Wednesday, May 1, 2019

eSKEPTIC: How Science Will Explain & Fix Fake News. by David Cowan

Fake news, crafted to exploit us, wreaks
havoc on our health, finances and politics. VeriSign founder David Cowan avers
that science is the key to combatting the spread of disinformation.

How
Science Will Explain & Fix Fake News

by David Cowan

The instant, global spread of
information through the Internet clearly benefits us as individuals and as a
civilization. But the Internet can also be wielded to spread disinformation, a
formidable downside of the technology that we’ve recently labeled “fake news.”
Simple web publishing tools enable anyone to fabricate stories that appear
identical to legitimate journalism, which prompts social media users—both human
and robotic—to share them as easily as real news. Fake news, crafted to exploit
us, wreaks havoc on our health, finances and politics.

Reality constrains the quantity of real news stories, but our
boundless imaginations unleash a torrent of fake stories that now overwhelm our
news feeds. Not only does fake news deceive us, it undermines our trust in
legitimate news sources. This is the real catastrophe and, many believe, the
objective of Russia’s fake news campaign leading up to the 2016 U.S. elections.
Fake news threatens the institution of democracy itself, because an uninformed
public cannot make sound governance decisions.

Many groups have tried to stem fake news through various
fact-checking initiatives that have all failed, because they fundamentally
misunderstand the problem. Some employ human editors, who cannot possibly keep
up in any useful timeframe. More scalable schemes crowd-source the work, as
though the public could possibly know what is happening elsewhere in the world.
Others employ machine learning, as though reality follows some recognizable
pattern. Others use automated reference-checking to verify facts elsewhere
online, defying the very definition of “news.” Some internet media platforms
necessarily publish “both sides of the story” side by side, serving up
contradictory facts that guarantee misinformation and confusion. Some find the
problem so intractable that their only remedy is to “educate the public” that
news sources simply cannot be trusted, and that truth is a matter of opinion
always “worthy of respect.” […]